Rachel Massey
South Yorkshire is taking a major step forward in Creative Health. Our new Creative Health Enabling Plan (2025–2028) sets out how creativity and culture will become part of the region’s long-term health and wellbeing strategy – aligned with local and national priorities for prevention and inclusion.
The plan offers a bold and practical roadmap for how creativity and culture supports health and wellbeing, including an illustrated story of Mina, who benefits from Creative Health from birth into old age.
The plan has been developed by the South Yorkshire Creative Health Board, working with local authorities, the NHS, the Voluntary Sector, Arts Council England, SYMCA and cultural partners. It builds on years of collaboration and learning across our four places – Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield – and sets out how Creative Health will become a routine part of health and care delivery.
This work connects directly to wider regional and national priorities. The plan supports the South Yorkshire Integrated Care Strategy, the Health is Wealth Report, and the Mayoral Combined Authority’s ambitions for inclusive growth and prevention. It also aligns with the national shift from treatment to prevention set out in the Government’s Fit for the Future 10-Year Health Plan for England.
By joining up the dots between health, culture and communities, the plan aims to make sure creative approaches are embedded within neighbourhood models of care, public health programmes, and social prescribing systems – not added on as an afterthought.
Over the next three years, partners will focus on five key priorities:
- Aligning Creative Health with system-wide strategies and structures
- Scaling prevention and early intervention programmes
- Developing the workforce and supporting co-production
- Securing sustainable funding and commissioning models
- Strengthening research, data and evidence
South Yorkshire is already seen as a national testbed for Creative Health infrastructure – and this new plan shows how we’ll continue to lead the way.
